Comparison of other major cities that can fit inside LA

Los Angeles has infamously been known for its urban sprawl. A recently released map makes it look like LA could easily swallow several major US cities inside its bloated city limits belly. See the map below and follow the subsequent discussion on reddit.com.

Directly related: the exhibition Rethink LA: Perspectives on a Future City tries to tackle the homegrown problem, envision ways that could help Los Angeles lose some of the body fat and prepare for a brighter future. Rethink LA is on display for one more week, until September 4, at the A+D Museum, 6032 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles.

10 Comments

This is a map of LA county not the city of LA. And there is a city of LA, with a downtown area that has skyscrapers and people commute to it. Which is not to miss the point that LA is a sprawled out decentralized area with all the pros and cons of that. This map it think is more interesting as an image of civic pride, a depiction of LA as bigger and badder than other cities, which I find amusing but not super informative (see reddit). I think LA county would fit inside the greater SF Bay Area - so there!

Feb 7, 13 12:13 pm ·

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RickB-Astoria

It is the city limits boundary of the City of Los Angeles not the county or the surrounding cities that makes up the Greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. I used to live there and the official city limits haven't really moved much at all. As far as I can tell, it hasn't changed at all. What has changed is the development within and beyond the city limits. L.A. had a long time ago established the large city limits when it was growing. Some of the lands were once farm land in the city limits. Some of them were undeveloped hillsides and yet to be developed and redeveloped neighborhoods when there was an explosive growth in population growth from the 1920s on into the 1960s and slowed down somewhat in the 1970s on to the present but eventually what were desert towns, had started to become developed and the sprawl continued on from the 1970s through to the present. While the growth is not as explosive as it once was, it is still sprawling. It isn't really Los Angeles but other cities that begin to be transformed from small desert communities with maybe a few hundred to a thousand or two thousand to now cities with 50,000 to over 100,000. This is where most future growth will happen as the inner city area is already developed without much more you can do other than go vertical. While some areas are currently seeing that with developing condo hi-rises of 5-10 stories versus the old 1-3 story apartments. It is still unlikely to see the scale of skyscrapers seen in New York due to local seismic environment and politics. At one time, there was a strict limit. Now, there are only limited areas where the height limits are way up there and there are a lot of areas where they still have zoning based height limits and approval for variance can be ripe with politics. Don't forget NIMBY politics effect.

Yes, this is LA City inside the blue boundary, around 470 square miles. (Versions of this map have been floating around since the 1920s.) LA County is about 10x that size, holding almost ninety municipalities.

When Richard Neutra and his CIAM colleagues compared dozens of same-scale city maps in 1933, the many panels needed for the LA version “produced a monstrosity of oversize."

Also: the amount of area inside a municipality's boundary in and of itself is not sprawl or a development pattern, naive comments about a "bloated city limits belly" aside. (You could carve it up into ten smaller jurisdictions and still have the same overall physical form.)

The big problem with LA's big area has to do with governance, or adequate governability. There are 35 separate planning areas, for example. The number of neighborhood councils is pushing a hundred, and still counting. Every couple of decades, part of the city talks about seceding. About ten years ago the (San Fernando) Valley attempted this (again), but the measure failed.

Both the City of Los Angeles (compared to other cities) and the County of Los Angeles are huge by land mass standards, although comparing metro areas is a challenge. The map above is indeed the City of Los Angeles, not the county, although the cities that fit within the map have varying degrees of sprawl and land use patterns. Obviously, leaving out the other New York boroughs is a bit of a distortion when comparing the tiny Manhattan to the City of LA, and St. Louis city has had a restricted boundary for over 150 years, allowing for a much larger metropolitan area than the core city, not unlike the Washington, D.C. area, vastly larger than the relatively tiny District of Columbia.

With respect to comparing the map to the Bay Area, it all depends on what is included. The nine county Bay Area, at 6,900 square miles is certainly larger than the 469 miles of the City of LA or the 4,000 square mile County of LA. But that is comparing one county to nine. If you include the counties in the larger LA region (LA, Orange, Riverside, San Bernadino, Ventura, and Imperial counties), you have a region of 38,000 square miles, much larger than the Bay Area. Land use patterns vary, but LA is big.

Long Beach is not even included. And yes they are comparing LA CITY LIMT NOT COUNTY. add parts of Ventura county and orange. Lots of traffic!!!!!

Oct 23, 19 6:09 pm ·

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RickB-Astoria

Yes, indeed. They are only comparing the city limits not the area of the county or the "greater los angeles metropolitan area" which is more of a urban/suburbanized development area not a official boundary of subpolitical bodies within the state.

The city limits of New York does include areas other than Manhattan. I think the people who made up this comparison did a flawed job with New York City official city limits which they could have obtained and make a comparison. NYC is also complicated and unique in that it is a county and city at the same time so to speak and hard to compare apples to apples given its unique structuring. So you have to count the five boroughs to be the city boundary of New York City as a whole. It is a consolidated city.

Los Angeles isn't quite that across the whole current metropolitan area but Los Angeles's size is probably created by a similar process. In fact, it was a little bigger until some of the other areas split off and became independent cities even though some of those cities still share the school district.

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